Half An Interview

: I'm sorry I'm late.

: They don't? I'm surprised. Who? No, no, don't actually tell me. I mean, I'm at least 45 minutes late and we're not Spain, or, I don't know, Thailand, so... that's rude, right? That's rude.

: ::laughs:: It's just how my family raised me.

: I don't know if it's all that unusual. Just because these freakishly talented families who just squirt out one after another after another are so high profile, doesn't mean that the majority of us just sort of come out of nowhere. I don't mean to call them nowhere, of course. But as you said, my mom's a dentist and my dad's a kindergarten teacher. We didn't even have a TV in the house, actually. The first movie I saw was 'Home Alone', I was 6, it was at a friend's house, and I stopped watching it after the kid threw up pizza. That was just gross. You remember that scene? Almost on grossness par with Tom Hanks puking into his astronaut helmet in Apollo 13. Oh God, I'm sure it's not actually called an astronaut helmet. I just can't remember the right term. But the splattering like it was going to come out of the screen... anyway, I walked out of that one too. Right out of the theatre and sank to my knees in the hallway.

: No, I obviously have a serious phobia of throwing up.

: In Ladies? That was a body double.

: Yes.

: Yes, I really got a body double to puke for me. Why would I lie about that? Actually - am I allowed to say this? I'm sure I am - it wasn't real, anyway. It was oatmeal. With honey and egg or something. Just spitting it up while fake gagging. But still. Couldn't do it. In fact, I don't watch that scene in the movie.

: Okay, good idea. I agree.

: I didn't. I wasn't one of those kids who declares they want to act from, I don't know, straight out of the womb, and then joins all the theater groups in school and gets to play Macbeth or the equivalent thereof for the rest of their secondary school career. I didn't actually act until college.

: No, I should amend that, actually. I didn't act formally until college. When I was a kid I pretended I was different people all the time. My longest standing character, created, I think, when I was four, had emigrated from Russia, played the xylophone proficiently, and spoke an invented-on-the-spot language that sounded nothing like Russian. But I think they don't call that acting. I think they call that lying.

: Of course I didn't! That was the fun of it. But you're good. My mother said that to me once. She said, 'if you want to tell stories, that's fine, but just make sure to tell us they're stories afterwards so we don't worry.' Of course, I listened, and nodded, and then ran off and did not listen to her advice because seriously, what's the point in telling stories if people know they're fake so they can relax? You want to draw people in. You want their real emotions and their real reactions. Or else it's 'that's a great story, sweetie!' instead of 'Holy $#!&, you saw WHAT? Are you okay?' There's a difference. There's a huge difference. Especially to a kid and especially to an actor. Oh, can you write 'holy $#!&' in this magazine? Oh well, too late if you can't.

: In fictional movies? We do the exact opposite. I mean, yes, of course, it's a movie and it's classified as fiction or nonfiction, so its packaging is an inherent caveat. Sort of like saying, 'Mom, this is going to be a lie.' But as soon as people are past the packaging, once they're in the theatre or at home in front of their televisions with the DVD inserted, our very first goal, our first and most important goal, is to make people forget the packaging, and forget the label. Forget we ever said 'Mom, this is a lie.' We want them to believe with every synapse in their brain that this is reality, that it's actually happening. That every occurrence on the screen will impact their world. If Yellowstone does erupt, for example, you know, onscreen, we want people rushing to their underground shelters with Saltines in hand before they realize what they're doing.

: I would. I would absolutely support the idea of people running in droves out of the theatre to take shelter. And not just because they'd have to buy another ticket later when they realized what they'd done. ::laughs::

: No, I think any director's ideal is to achieve that level of realism. Maybe I'm wrong.

: Well, I'm grown up now, but more to the point, everyone knows who I am. I can't make up pasts for myself. I can't say that something happened to me when it didn't. There'd be hundreds - thousands - of people who knew me at some point in my life stepping forward and testifying against me. Well, not testifying. I don't mean to infuse this with such unnecessary gravity. Because obviously, it's not like it's a human right to have the freedom to lie to people whenever you want.

: On the contrary, actually. Sometimes, after acting in scenes where everything's so carefully scripted to be clever, or momentous, or hilarious - real life starts failing to measure up. I mean, no conversation can possibly match a placed plot point in a story. Not every time I talk to a man in a coffeeshop is going to end in a night full of whimsical adventure and mystery. Not any time will. But at the same time, not every time I walk to the bus stop is going to end with my getting pulled, unwillingly, into a murder scheme which puts my life in danger and, ultimately, gets my organs harvested in a bathtub. Not any time will. Hopefully.

: But do you know what I mean? Everything you do when you're not acting starts seeming flat. It starts to seem like it's the unreal part. That it's filler. And that's not a good feeling. Because even though it doesn't feel like it sometimes, the filler is the majority. I mean, I'm sitting here, calling real life filler, instead of, you know... real life.

: No, I wouldn't call it depressed, per se. I might call it dread, but that's being extremely pessimistic about it, and you sort of pointed me in that direction. See, as I get older, the filler may slowly become everything. Because no one can maintain the same level of frenetic working as they age. Even though of course, I'd prefer to. I'd prefer to always be speaking some perfect line of script, or else, at least, to always be a pawn in someone else's grand scheme. But right now... you know, most people who would refer to their real life as 'filler' have nothing else to escape into. Real life is real life and that's their everyday experience, every second of every day. And yeah, I'd call them depressed.

: You mean it's not immediately obvious?

: Of course. Well, the reason I'm different is because my real life also consists of these scripted moments and schemes. Just because it's meant to be a fabricated story doesn't mean I'm not physically doing it. A great percentage of my life actually is spent contributing to these fantastic stories and feeling for all the world like I'm influencing them. I don't have that 'every second of my life having to be my own life' thing going on. If that makes sense.

: I don't know if dramatic scenes are something that someone can stop expecting to just happen. I don't know that I'll ever shake the feeling that my words, the way they come out naturally, will never be as good as a sentence some screenplay writer agonized over for weeks. And why should they, anyway? Why should they?